CNN anchor Jake Tapper urged his control room on Tuesday to stop playing video of Donald Trump’s visit to a Miami café following his arraignment, calling it nothing more than a “spectacle” and a “campaign ad.”
After pleading not guilty to a 37-count indictment for allegedly mishandling classified documents, the ex-president made a preplanned post-arrest visit to Versailles, an iconic Little Havana restaurant, where he was hailed as a hero.
With patrons celebrating Trump’s birthday a day early, CNN eventually returned to a studio panel moderated by Tapper.
As soon as the network stopped running tape of Trump’s visit, Tapper bluntly noted to his colleagues: “To the folks in the control room, I don’t need to see any more of that. He’s trying to turn it into a spectacle and into a campaign ad. That is enough of that. We’ve seen it already.”
Tapper wasn’t the only cable news host to nix footage of Trump’s Versailles stopover. “We don’t need to see that anymore, we know where he is,” MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace said just after Trump entered the restaurant.
The twice-impeached ex-president was none too happy with the veteran anchor’s insistence that his network cease airing any additional footage from Trump’s restaurant sojourn. And in standard Trumpian fashion, the former commander-in-chief played fast and loose with the facts.
“Fake Tapper just demanded that his broadcast be closed down from Miami because there was far too much enthusiasm on the streets for ‘Trump.’ The good news is, he was the only one to do so, perhaps a good explanation as to why CNN’s ratings are so low!” Trump blared on his social media site Truth Social.
Of course, Tapper only called for his program’s team to stop rolling live footage of Trump’s cafe trip, not the additional news happening in Miami. Additionally, Tapper wasn’t the “only one to do so” as MSNBC pulled away from the restaurant visit even earlier than CNN.
